Gustave Flaubert once said, "We do not choose our subjects, they choose us," and as the author of Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education, it's safe to assume that he knows a thing or two about it.
When I'm writing, the situation is often a starting point for me - man sleeps with brother's wife, son admits to partner's murder - and I can write hundreds of pages on all the ramifications and nuances of these core events before it becomes apparent to me that what I'm actually writing about is the estrangement and reconciliation between parents and their children. That's my theme, or so it seems, but it is so profoundly rooted in my subconscious that it only becomes evident to me when the work is completed and I take a step back from it. Because I am in some way channelling direct from a place deep inside me without having made a conscious decision about it, it really does feel as if the subject has chosen me.
Perhaps as a writer you should creatively ignore the themes which interest you and leave your subconscious -- that creative powerhouse -- to get on with it. Busy yourself with plot and situation, but do so in the knowledge that it is the themes that emerge from your work which will define it - sibling rivalry, unrequited love, whatever they turn out to be - and that they will keep cropping up (choosing you) again and again. In this sense, they are the DNA buried in your writing, evident in every cell, in every word.
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